How to weight assignment groups for re-sits

This article provides a guide for arranging assignment groups for newly created assignments for students re-sitting their exams.

Option 1: Allow re-submissions to the original assignment

If you allow the resitting student(s) to resubmit to the original assignment, the gradebook calculations will remain correct, with no further steps required.

However, note that if the original submission was a Turnitin assignment, the first submission will be erased. It is recommended that you download the original submission from the Turnitin inbox before allowing the re-submission.

If the assignment is a Canvas assignment, all submissions will remain within the assignment. However, note that these are deleted with the courses every 2 years, and to retain them longer, you must download the submissions, whereas Turnitin submissions are accessible from Turnitin.com.

Option 2: Re-sits are submitted to a newly created assignment

If you feel the need to create a new assignment, and therefore a new column in the gradebook, for the re-sit submissions, you will need to make adjustments to your assignment group weightings in order for the grades to calculate correctly.

Prior to creation of the new re-sit assignment, place each assignment its own separate assignment group.

For instance, if you had previously had one group in which all 4 submissions were worth 60% of the total mark and one group where one quiz was worth 40% of your mark, you would now need to re-distribute the 4 submissions to their own assignment group, each at 15%.

However, if you ARE utilising a 'drop the lowest score' rule - for instance, if in the image above, students choose to write on 3 of the 4 questions, this method will not calculate the grade correctly.

If you need to have separate assignment submissions for re-sit assignments in which students select some of the questions to write on, then see below section for guidance on this.

Your re-distributed groups will then add in the re-sit submissions.

Your next step will be to assign a rule to each of the assignment groups.

  1. Click the three stacked dots.
  2. Choose edit.
  3. In the Number of scores to ignore for each student section, change Lowest scores: from 0 to 1.
  4. Click save.
  5. Repeat for each assignment group.

Note: you must assign a grade of 0 for all non-submitting students. You can do this quickly by using the Set default grade feature in the gradebook.

Do NOT tick the box to override existing grades!

Option 2B: Drop the lowest score - partly manual

If you must create new assignment submission links for re-sitting students, then leave the assignment groupings as you originally had them (e.g. 4 questions from which the student pick 3, the one they skip is dropped using the 'drop the lowest score: 1' feature).

  1. Create another assignment group identical to the original, each now labeled re-sit, but make it worth 0% of the total grade.
  2. Mark these as usual when submissions are in.
  3. In the gradebook move the columns so that each original assignment is directly next to its re-sit column.
  4. Manually change the original mark to the re-sit mark and add a note in the Notes column for your external examiner if needed.

Step 3 pictured below - the red box is around the re-sitting student.

Step 4 pictured below - the red box is around the re-sitting student, now with the marks adjusted into the original assignments in order to allow for the correct grade calculation.

Because the re-sit assignments are in a group worth 0% of the total grade, only the original weighting applies. Therefore, when you change the original mark to the re-sit mark, the weighting will update according to the weightings required.